


The Umatilla Mail

by prufrock



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Background Case, Bank Robbery, Canon-Typical Violence, Childhood Trauma, Class Differences, Crush at First Sight, Dutch van der Linde Being an Asshole, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, First Meetings, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Sex, M/M, Minor Violence, Post-Break Up, Vomiting, Weather, mild arthur whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:00:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28677807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prufrock/pseuds/prufrock
Summary: Not long after Hosea leaves the gang, Dutch starts working on a plan for a big heist, but Arthur isn't doing well after Mary dumped him. Dutch isn't sure he can trust his right-hand man anymore, and Arthur isn't sure he ought to.or,Arthur's got alcohol and daddy issues. Dutch has control issues. Everyone's having a bad time.Written, sort of, in response tothispost by dumbcowboahs on tumblr.
Relationships: Annabelle/Dutch van der Linde, Bessie Matthews/Hosea Matthews, Hosea Matthews/Dutch van der Linde, Mary Gillis Linton/Arthur Morgan
Comments: 5
Kudos: 24





	The Umatilla Mail

**Author's Note:**

> This is a loose sequel to my previous fic, [Bachelor's Grove](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28368408). It's not a formal series and you don't need to read that one to understand this one.

1\. _Eastern Oregon, 1888_

The overland mail to Umatilla is driven by a man named Horace Wick. Horace Wick, raised in the Heartlands by a good Presbyterian mother and a father who drove mules for the army in ‘64, is a quiet man. As a boy, he dreamed of adventure, but like most boys found upon leaving school that adventure failed to advertise in the wanted section of the local paper. Horace bought a ticket heading west, took a job with the California and Oregon Stage Company running mail north and south from the ports of the Columbia to the edges of the Blue Mountains, and forgot about adventure. He keeps a family, a wife and two sweet boys, in a little town west of Baker City, and on Sunday he reads the newspaper to his wife, and every time his coach passes through Gopher Flats, Horace Wick stops outside Julia Raymond’s boardinghouse and stays a spell in the back room, where he and four gentlemen from the Bishop sheep ranch play five-card stud for half of Horace’s paycheck. 

Dutch learned this on a rainy night in May 1888, over a bottle of sour mash whiskey with one of the gentlemen from the ranch. William was his name, and he was shaped like a sheep himself, with wooly hair and a face built out of square angles. 

“You should join us some day,” he intoned woozily, nodding at Dutch through the smoke of his neighbor’s pipe. 

“Maybe I will,” Dutch said, raising his glass to William, who whooped sleepily and downed the last of his drink with a wheezing gurgle that threatened to reverse itself. 

The information stored itself at the back of Dutch’s mind, resting there for weeks as they made their way through the Blue Mountains. 

It’s lonely, being on the road without Hosea. Dutch didn’t realize until it was over how much Hosea had worked himself into the fabric of Dutch’s life these last twelve years. Now that he’s gone, his absence is everywhere: in the silence of the camp at daybreak without his thin, off-key humming, in the half of Dutch’s trunk where his books used to live, in the pauses between Dutch’s sentences. Annabelle’s filled his spot in Dutch’s tent, of course, and Dutch loves Annabelle, loves her like it’s the only thing that feeds him, loves her in the way he never intended to love any woman. But as they leave the Grizzlies behind and cross the low, dry plains of southern Oregon, Hosea’s on his mind like fingerprints clouding glass. 

Even with Hosea and Bessie gone, there’s enough mouths in camp to keep Dutch more than busy feeding them. There’s Annabelle and Grimshaw, the two feminine poles of the family thrown into sharp relief with the removal of Bessie’s grounding influence, and now young Tilly, who’s fourteen and advancing so fast in her reading lessons that Dutch suspects she spends what little time Grimshaw gives her practicing on her own out of sheer determination to get the thing right. Then there’s John, who came to them about three feet high and wild as a sick dog, who spent his first year in the gang screaming in his sleep every night and talking to rocks and trees and biting anyone who dared to suggest he wash up or help with chores or act, generally, like a normal human child. Lately, though, he’s quieted down: he’s finally learning, with Tilly’s encouragement, to read and write, and he listens when Dutch talks, with a look on his thin, serious face like he’s really thinking about what it means. 

And then, of course, there’s Arthur. Arthur’s always been the Saint Peter of Dutch’s little band of disciples: solid, dutiful, steady; a rock of a man Dutch counts as something closer than a son. In the years since Dutch found him robbing a milk wagon in southern Indiana, fourteen and big for his age and as quiet as he was quick with a gun, he’s settled into a place at Dutch’s right hand, the indefatigable counterweight to Hosea’s wit. But Arthur’s changed since Chicago. Oh, he works as hard as ever—Dutch thinks if a house fell on Arthur, he’d carry the beams on his shoulders till he finished his job. But he sleeps less, talks almost never, and he stinks of whiskey all the time. A week after he talks to William about the secret poker game at Julia Raymond’s, Dutch has to ride down to the jailhouse in Meacham to relieve the sheriff of Arthur’s care after Saint Peter spent a night downing cheap liquor and breaking skulls in the local gin mill. 

“We’re wanted men,” Dutch reminds him as they exit the jail. Arthur, of all people, should know this. Arthur was the one who sounded the alarm in Chicago, the one who heard the chief of police planning the raid; the one who saved them all. Arthur screws his eyes shut against the morning sun, swerves towards his horse, and ducks sideways to vomit in the gray dirt. 

“Sorry.” He spits on the earth, hands on his knees, shoulders held tense in case he’s not finished. 

“I’m not askin’ for an apology,” Dutch says. He misses Hosea. 

Arthur’s not finished. Dutch lights a cigar while Arthur pukes, and thinks about the overland mail to Umatilla. 

Chicago ruined them. Dutch knows this. In Chicago, they had a house and a halfway honest business, even if Grimshaw did charge boarders a little extra to avail themselves of the fairest amenities. In Chicago, there was money for the taking, from self-satisfied donors at charity luncheons and gullible dowagers in Lincoln Park, and, in the end, from the Lee and Hoyt banking house. More important, in Chicago they did some good: the money they took from the Ashville scam, and later from the bank, went to the orphanage, and to the church, and to the Rockford Female Seminary, and the old man’s factory went to the foremen, who’ve made the place a monument to honest work instead of greed. 

Yet the feeling that suffused his consciousness that morning, as they picked their way along canals and back roads out of town with John whining and Grimshaw swearing and Hosea telling everyone to shut up before the law heard and rolled them into the penitentiary, was joy. It’s ridden with him ever since, a bright, live coal in his chest as he watched the Lannahechee roll, as they climbed the sweet, poppy-strewn fields of the outer Grizzlies, as he lies under the stars each night and listens to the hawks scream. 

In the city, a man’s never a man. Never his own. Never fully conscious of the better part of his nature. 

They picked up Tilly passing through Lemoyne, and wintered in the Grizzlies, eight bodies packed in a cabin forty feet by twenty. Dutch spent as much time as he could out of doors, under those glorious blue skies teaching John to hunt and Tilly to ride, and when the weather forced him in he sat by a glowing hearth and read about America, a nation blessed by a lord he’s not sure exists and damned by the greed of stupid men and cursed with the power to imagine a better world. Then the snow melted, and Hosea stopped him by the wood shed and said me and Bessie, we’re not coming along, we’re staying here. 

Dutch remembers that moment with penetrating clarity. He remembers the odd pattern of wood chips in the snow at Hosea’s feet; the incessant dripping of an icicle just out of sight. At first, when Hosea said it, Dutch thought he must be joking. He remembers wanting to hit him. 

“What do you mean,” he said, and Hosea laughed and said, “I knew you’d take it hard.” 

“I ain’t taking anything _hard_ , Hosea,” Dutch said, and Hosea kissed him and then apologized, the two of them standing there in the icy filth between the outhouse and the shed and Dutch’s heart wrestling against his ribcage so hard it nearly stopped his breath. He wondered if Hosea could hear it. Wondered, if he could, if it would make him stay. 

Dutch thinks, if he’d put money on which of them would end the thing and settle down, he wouldn’t have put his money on Hosea. He wouldn’t have put it on either of them. 

A man loses himself in the city, and sometimes he loses himself all over again when he leaves. 

Now they’re in the northern reaches of the Blue Mountains, at the southern border of Washington Territory, and Dutch is closer than he’s ever been to stepping outside the formal jurisdiction of the United States government. What he wants, more than anything, is to cross the Columbia and light out into the territory, try to find a little of the freedom that seems harder to come by every year this side of civilization. But to do that he needs money, and money is what they lost in Chicago. And that’s where the Umatilla mail coach comes in, and Horace Wick. 

“I need you to stay strong, Arthur,” Dutch says as they ride out of Meacham. “Can’t have you bringing trouble on us now.” 

Arthur grunts, bent low in his saddle, hiding from the sun. There’s a thick scab forming on his bottom lip, blood matted in his left eyebrow. 

Dutch isn’t a fool. For two years, in Chicago, Arthur was stepping out with Mary Gillis, writing her love notes and blushing to heaven when anyone mentioned her name, and a month before the police came marching down Cherry Street, Mary Gillis took the ring he gave her and failed to give back an answer. Oh, Dutch knows. But it’s been a year since then, and Arthur’s melancholy’s only deepened. This ain’t the first time Dutch has had to drag him out of a cell still drunk from the night before. 

Hosea would know what to say to him, but Hosea’s in a hollow in the Grizzlies with Bessie, living an honest life. They’ll be getting ready for winter now, chopping extra wood and piling it in the shed, canning the last of the beans for the long months ahead. 

“The past’s the past,” Dutch says. “I need you here, Arthur. I need you _now._ ” 

“I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Arthur says. His eyes aren’t on the road. 

God damn Chicago, Dutch thinks. Two thousand miles away, and they’re still not out of that town. He turns his horse up the path toward the mountain pass where their cluster of tents are staked, a stop in the wilderness at the gates to the promised land. 

  
  


2\. _Chicago_ , _1886_

The suit Dutch bought him is making Arthur’s neck itch. He thinks if Grimshaw’d put any more starch in the collar, it might draw blood. 

He’s never dressed up this nice before, but then, he’s never attended a church social before. Hosea was clear that church socials required a certain level of formal wear, and Arthur countered that he was mainly there to pick folks’ pockets anyways, and Hosea pointed out that Episcopalians generally don’t let criminals in old jeans close enough to pick their pockets, and Arthur conceded. Dutch took him to a tailor on the west side and got him measured for the suit, and Bessie made him sit on the floor so she could comb his hair out right, and here he is, shaved and itching and wishing he’d stayed at home with John and the girls and the horses. 

The yard at All Saints’ is decked out for the occasion in lights and streamers, with tables set across the grass and bouquets from the yards of the ladies’ auxiliary set in jam jars all around. There’s a low table spread with pies and chicken and heaps of cold potatoes, and pitchers of lemonade on the side. All the ladies are dressed in hoop skirts and towering hats, and all the men are dressed like him: black suits, slicked hair, collars so sharp it’s like they’re trying to warn the devil away by their necks alone. It’s the nicest party Arthur’s ever been to, and he hates it here. 

On the other side of the party, he can see Hosea locked in conversation with the parson and an alderman with a wide belly; he can’t tell what they’re talking about, but he recognizes the look on Hosea’s face. That sublime mix of concentration and nonchalance, with the spark of glee underneath: Hosea is having fun. In fact, from the little crowd of listeners gathered around his little knot, it would seem that Hosea, who Arthur’s heard call the Lord Jesus Christ a brazen old coot and “nearly as good a con as me, if he hadn’t been caught,” is the life and soul of the All Saints’ Annual Church Social. 

Arthur chuckles, and rattles the coins in his pocket. He’s lifted, by his calculation behind the trellis a few minutes ago, about $17 off the good people of All Saints’, and he figures by the end of the day he can get a little more. 

He’s fixing his sights on an old gentleman with wire-rimmed spectacles and a bit of a tilted look in his eye when somebody taps his arm. He turns, and finds himself face to face with the prettiest lady he’s ever met. 

She’s young—about his age, or maybe a few years shy. She’s got dark hair, pulled neatly back into a soft puff at the back of her head, a few strands floating about her face in a sweet halo of excitement. There’s a dark mole on her cheek, and for some reason Arthur can’t stop staring at it, can’t think of ever seeing anything so captivating, so perfectly unexpected. He feels, suddenly, light-headed. 

“Oh,” she says, “I thought you were—I mistook you for someone else.” 

“ _Wha_ ,” is what Arthur says. 

The girl laughs a little, apologetic and teasing at the same time. “I’m so sorry, I was looking for Mr. Adolphus—the organist, you know, I thought you were him for a moment.” Her voice is like wine. Like champagne. 

“No,” Arthur says, and he’s painfully aware of how rough his voice sounds next to hers, “I ain’t—I’m not him. I can’t even play a harmonica.” 

She laughs again, even though Arthur didn’t mean that as a joke. “Mary Gillis,” she says, holding out her hand like a peace offering, a gift to smooth over the awkwardness. “I don’t believe we’ve met.” 

“Arthur,” Arthur says, before he remembers that he’s meant to be Hosea and Bessie’s son. “Arthur Ashville.” 

“Pleased to meet you, Arthur Ashville,” Mary says, smiling. She tilts her head to one side, studying him, and Arthur sends up a silent message of gratitude to Hosea for insisting on the suit. “You’re Mr. Ashville’s son?”

Of course she knows Hosea. Everyone at this party knew Hosea ten minutes after he walked in. He nods. “We moved into town a few months back, over the winter.” That’s true, anyhow. 

“He’s awfully—” She searches for the word. “He really is something, isn’t he?” 

Arthur chuckles. “He is indeed, Miss Gillis.” 

She’s lived in Chicago all her life, he learns as they talk, circling the low picnic tables and sipping sweet lemonade. Her ma passed when she was small, and her daddy works in town; he helped build the church, she says, and Arthur looks up at the wooden spire and says he did a fine job.

Mary laughs. “No,” she says, “I meant he helped pay for it.” 

“Oh,” Arthur says, and he can feel his cheeks getting hot. “Well, he—it’s a fine church, a real fine church.” He doesn’t know what he’s saying; doesn’t know why she’s still talking to him. But she smiles, with something warm in her eyes, and says, “It turned out real beautiful,” and they keep walking. 

They’re talking about the new train line when Hosea comes and catches Arthur by the arm, reminding him that his dear mother will be expecting them both home, and Arthur realizes that he’s still only made $17 off the congregation. But when he turns to Mary and gives his apologies, she smiles and says, “I hope I’ll see you again,” and his heart thuds and splutters in his chest. 

“Who was that?” Hosea asks as they ride south towards Cherry Street. There’s a hint of laughter in his voice. Arthur knows what he looked like. 

“Her name’s Mary,” he says. 

That summer, Arthur courts Mary Gillis in long, quiet walks through Washington Square and along Oak Street. He takes her to dinner at the Palmer House, with financing from the loose pocketbook of a sleepy banker on the streetcar, and buys her a little cigarette case with doves carved on the front in mother-of-pearl. He picks flowers along Thorn Creek and wraps them in a ribbon he snagged from one of Grimshaw’s girls, and one evening he meets Mary under a full moon in Garfield Park and she kisses him. Her lips are soft and warm and feather-light, and Arthur nearly spins right out of his body there in the moonlight. 

She doesn’t know his real name—still believes he’s Arthur Ashville, the unlikely grandson to the old departed steel magnate—and as the summer wears on and their kisses under the willows in Garfield Park become more frequent and more breathless, Arthur doesn’t know how to admit the lie. It’s barely even a lie, he tells himself. After all, Hosea _is_ probably the closest thing he’s got to a father, and what’s a name? 

Mary’s own father is a sour old wolf of a man, a thread merchant with a taste for brandy and, Arthur quickly gathers, an approach to household discipline based in rigid laws and harsh consequences. He is, in every sense, the kind of man Dutch most despises. Mary never says it, but Arthur can tell from the odd turn in her voice and the way she looks away that she’s afraid of him. Weeks into their courtship, and Arthur’s only met the man once, in the wood-paneled foyer of a house so grand Arthur couldn’t believe he was allowed inside with his muddy boots. He was dropping Mary off from their Sunday walk in the square, and when Mr. Gillis saw him, passing in the hall beyond a stand of potted palms, the look on the old man’s face made Arthur’s palms sweat. 

“Tell me about your family,” she asks him once, when they’re sitting on a park bench smoking in the evening breeze. The sun’s dipping under the trees at the edge of the park, and the air’s lit up half-gold, half-green. Mary’s hair is up in a twisted braid; her fingers are intertwined with his. She’s beautiful. Arthur has no idea what to say to her. 

“Not much to tell,” he says, shrugging. He’s not Hosea; he can’t spin yarns at the ready. “My pa—Father, I mean, Father came west a couple years back, looking for _his_ pa, and, well, I s’pose you know all about that.” He’s always conscious, talking to Mary, of sounding like a nobody from spud country who’s spent more time in the society of horses than fine society. Like exactly who he is, in other words. 

Mary frowns. “You never talk about them.” The end of her cigarette is a hot crumb of amber in the dusk. “I’ve only met your father.” 

Arthur tries to picture Mary, with her high-buttoned shoes and her heavy brooches, sitting in the parlor at Cherry Street, listening to Dutch lecture about the failure of the American state while John picks his nose and wipes it on the wallpaper. The idea makes his stomach quaver. 

“It’s just him and me, really,” Arthur says. “My mother died when I was little.” That much, at least, is true. 

Mary looks at him, her head cocked left like she’s trying to find the right angle on him to make his secrets spill out. He thinks she’ll have to look a long time for that. “You know I don’t mind it—don’t you, Arthur? That you’re not—that your father hasn’t got as much money. I want to know _you_ , as you are, not—not the way you think I’d like for you to be.” 

He didn’t realize it was that obvious. He took her to the _Palmer_. 

“It’s not that,” he tells her, squinting out into the darkness, the heat of his cigarette threatening the bare pads of his finger and thumb. 

“What is it?” 

Arthur thinks about Dutch and Hosea, who once dressed up as a minister and his wife to steal a wagonload of cheese from a Swedish farmer. About the girls at the house with their bright paint and flowery perfume, and Grimshaw who smokes a pipe and cuts her nails while she counts up the money from the johns. About John, as much raccoon as boy, who Arthur found last week shoulder deep in a pile of chicken bones and house rubbish not five minutes after dinner, insisting he hadn’t eaten since yesterday and chewing furiously at a piece of tendon. He thinks about his own father, who broke into old Miss Winshaw’s cellar one summer and sold her china while the potato crop rotted in the ground, who Arthur never saw sober once in the five years before he died. 

Mary’s caught in the last gray light of the dying sun, and she looks like a picture painted by someone who talked to God. Arthur thinks, if it meant sitting close to her, he’d like to stay Arthur Ashville forever. 

“It’s nothin’,” he tells Mary, and kisses her. 

  
  


3\. _Eastern_ _Oregon, 1888_

It starts to rain around mid-day, and this is when Dutch first feels that things are going wrong. 

Dutch is not given to superstition. He prefers to leave that to other men, men with less to believe in and more patience with idiocy. Fate is one thing—and Dutch has always felt a certain force of destiny in whatever errant wind is driving him along his path—but seeing omens in a cloudy day or prophecy in his salt-cellar has never been his way. 

But around mid-day, it starts to rain, and Arthur, who rode out after breakfast to the offices of the California and Oregon Stage Company in Umatilla to inquire about the schedule so he can be sure his letter to dear Aunt Muriel in Gopher Flats arrives on time, hasn’t gotten back yet, and Dutch begins to feel something’s wrong. 

He ignores the feeling at first—sits under the tent canopy with John and Tilly, watching them copy out lines in the margins of the latest copy of _The New Northwest_ , and puts Arthur out of his mind. He’s getting supplies at the general store; he’s waiting until the rain lets up to journey back over the slick, treacherous mountain roads. Dutch listens to Annabelle reading the children a passage from _Treasure Island_ , and watches the rain fall harder. 

Then the children leave, and Annabelle stays behind, and works her fingers into Dutch’s hair and under the collar of his shirt, and his lips are on hers as she slips one hand down his chest to undo his belt buckle. He fucks her, fast and deliberate, while rain drums on the canvas and he pictures Pinkertons on the road from Umatilla. 

Arthur would never turn on him. Dutch is confident of that—confident, if nothing else, that Arthur’s intelligence rises just about to the level required for that kind of betrayal without quite reaching the mark. He’s a guard dog, not a fox: Dutch can always count on him to keep his place. But Arthur hasn’t been himself lately, and in Chicago the Pinkertons were nowhere to be seen at breakfast and out in force by lunchtime. 

All it would take is the chief of police in Chicago sending a telegram west. A hundred short bursts of electric current, fired across two thousand miles of unfettered grass, and Arthur could be in chains already, with Pinkertons riding down from the banks of the Columbia to make their capture. 

And that’s paradise, shut. 

“You’re quiet,” Annabelle says. They’re lying on the cot, arms twisted around each other, still naked underneath the camp blanket. She reaches up to cup his cheek, and he can smell himself on her, sharp and heavy. 

“Just thinking,” Dutch says. 

“You’re always thinking.” 

“Just wonderin’ what’s taking Arthur so long,” he admits, and Annabelle turns to face the ceiling of the tent, where wild rain’s still clamoring against the burlap. 

“Arthur’ll be along,” she tells him. She closes her eyes, and for a moment Dutch forgets about Arthur and about paradise, watching her breasts rise and fall as she yawns, pauses, and stretches against the beaten mattress, her dark hair tumbling down around her shoulders. 

The rain spits and slows and finally lets up; Arthur still hasn’t come back. Supper comes, beans and bitter biscuits, and when it’s done and Tilly’s washing the dishes in the stream behind camp while Annabelle and John scrape out the pot and tend the fire, Dutch turns to Miss Grimshaw and tells her to be ready to move; he’s going into town. 

“Trouble?” she asks, heavy brows knotting as she surveys the others at work. 

“Not if I can help it.” 

But then, before Dutch can saddle up, trouble rides in on a dappled black thoroughbred. Arthur’s flushed and unsteady in the saddle, and when he slips off Boadicea and staggers in the direction of his tent, Dutch can see he’s got a new set of bruises on his cheek and temple. The idiot’s been out drinking, while Dutch waits for the fist of damnation to come crashing down on them all. Dutch feels something snap deep inside him, a fuse lighting, starting some unrelenting chemical reaction in his gut. 

“Arthur!” 

He looks up, a wayward child caught out, defiance and panic crossed on his reddened face. Dutch sees him pause, steadying himself against the hitching post. 

“Dutch,” he says, and the syllable’s flat. 

“Awfully kind of you to drop in on us,” Dutch says, spreading his hands wide, flexing his fists lightly to catch the rage vibrating outward from his chest. “Began to think we might not have the honor.” 

“I was out, Dutch,” Arthur says, one hand pawing at his disheveled hair. “I was workin’.” 

“ _W_ _orking,_ ” Dutch repeats, savoring both syllables, turning to look at Miss Grimshaw and feeling his face crack into a delicious smile. “Arthur’s been working.” 

“So he says,” she sniffs, and turns back to the stew pot. Arthur shuffles on the spot, but he doesn’t make a move for his tent. Dutch finds the fact gratifying and tiresome in equal measure. 

“I sent you,” he tells Arthur, moving closer to make sure that every word hits its mark, “to check on the mail times from Umatilla. I sent you to bring me information, essential to our enterprise, information that I trusted you to bring me.” He’s close to Arthur now, can smell the whiskey on his hurried breath. “I sent you hours ago.” 

Arthur shakes his head. “There was rain.” 

“Not for hours,” Dutch snaps. The relief of knowing Arthur hasn’t betrayed them has worn off completely, and he’s angry now, plain and simple. “Hours, Arthur. Now, you may think that I’m some kind of simpleton—”

“I _don’t_ , Dutch—”

“—you may _think_ , Arthur, that I’m out here livin’ off the fat of the goddamn land for pleasure, duckin’ Pinkertons and plannin’ mail heists because that’s what I classify as _entertainment_ , but let me inform you, Arthur, that what I do, I do for the good of this camp; what I do, I do because it’s got to be done; and when I tell _you_ to do something, I expect to see it done, and I expect you to use your goddamn head and not spend all day gettin’ shit wasted and waitin’ for _me_ to clean up your fuckin’ messes!” 

Arthur’s swaying on the spot. His hands swing up, almost as if he’s bracing himself for a fight, but then they clutch at the back of his neck instead, frantic and useless. He’s glancing right and left as Dutch talks, like a cornered rabbit looking for an opening to bolt. 

“I ain’t drunk,” he growls through clenched teeth when Dutch finishes, and the boy couldn’t have picked a plainer lie if he’d made it his mission. 

“You stink,” Dutch tells him shortly. “When’s the next stage passing through Gopher Flats?” 

Arthur blinks, belches, and drops his hands to fists at his sides, clenching and unclenching. “Dunno,” he says, his voice pitched lower than normal, harsh with liquor and recalcitrance. “I don’t—‘m sorry, Dutch, I can’t—”

There’s something in his eyes that Dutch can’t place, a spark of misery unequal to the flat stupidity of this conversation. His lower lip’s bleeding, smearing red across his teeth and jaw. His chin’s set. 

“Can’t what,” Dutch says. Arthur shuts his eyes, shakes his head. 

“I don’t know.” 

“What the hell is wrong with you,” Dutch asks, and Arthur spits back, “I don’t know.” Says it like a dare, like he’s asking Dutch to tell him. 

“Get out,” Dutch says. The fuse is burning itself out; he’s tired. He can hear Arthur’s breath hitching in his throat, and he knows that stiff, combative stance too well. “I’m not going to fight you, Arthur. Just go, go sleep it off for Christ’s sake, get the hell out.” 

Arthur goes. Dutch turns back toward the campfire as he stumbles off, and meets John’s gaze. The boy’s hunched double by the fire, arms crossed over his knees and his face all but hidden behind them, but Dutch can see the sharp movement of his eyes as he watches Arthur go and looks back to Dutch. They’re shrewd eyes, Dutch thinks. For all the kid’s antics, John sees more than he used to. 

He dreams of Pinkertons that night, and of Hosea’s hand on a telegraph key, burning the fine notes of damnation into Dutch’s skin. He wakes before dawn to a damp sunrise and Arthur’s heavy feet on the mud outside, trudging back and forth across camp as he carries wood and water. Rolling over, he sees a scrap of paper on the table beside his cot. 

_Coach leaves La Grande on the 7th_ , the paper reads. _Gopher Flats 9pm. Two guards._

Outside, Arthur starts to whistle. An odd little sound, out of key. 

Dutch smiles. 

4\. _Chicago, 1886_

The house on Cherry Street has five bedrooms. Arthur’s isn’t the smallest, but it is the draftiest: the lofty window over the bed has some crack in its strong oak frame, so that when the wind picks up off the lake it worms into Arthur’s room, casting a chill over everything. In the new year, he finds the gap and stuffs an old sock into it. 

John has the little room down the hall, but after he wakes up five nights in a row screaming with nightmares about the devil, he moves in with Arthur, sleeping on the long divan by the fireplace. Arthur doesn’t mind, really: having a space to himself was nice, but it’s more the roof over his head he appreciates than the solitude. Besides, he’s warming up to the kid. Now that he’s settled in a bit and stopped worrying about getting sent to the orphanage, John’s full of stories, half of which seem too bizarre to be true and almost all of which are entertaining. He tells Arthur that he met an octopus swimming in the sewers under Chicago; that he once ate nothing but oranges for a week until he shit orange; that his father buried him alive to fool the mayor and accidentally dug up the wrong grave. Most of his stories end with him and his father, who Arthur gathers was an even less successful criminal than his own pa, eating steak for dinner, a sort of “happily ever after,” Arthur supposes. The theme recurs so often that Arthur begins to suspect John’s never eaten steak in his life. 

Their room is next to Grimshaw’s, which gets them in trouble when she’s trying to sleep and John’s whooping about steak and monsters. Dutch and Hosea, naturally, have the master, an oak cavern of a room with a four-poster bed and two walls of bookshelves, which leaves the remaining two rooms for the odd boarder and, later on, the girls Grimshaw takes under her wing. 

The sleeping arrangements change, though, the same summer Arthur starts seeing Mary. Not long after they got to Chicago, when they were still sleeping in tents outside a haunted cemetery, Hosea went to call on a lady named Bessie. She’s an old friend of his, he told Arthur, from the hill country back east, and the way he talks about her Arthur’s never seen him talk about anyone else. Hosea’s softer, somehow, when he’s with Bessie. He says they met on stage, playing _Twelfth Night_ for a crowd of hayseeds who didn’t know who Shakespeare was, but Arthur thinks that when Bessie comes around, it’s the only time Hosea stops performing. 

Bessie herself, Arthur can’t quite make out. She’s solidly built, with a husky voice from the pipe she’s always smoking and hair that’s red in some lights and drab in others. There’s something distinctly unfeminine about her, but she sings like Blanche Roosevelt and she makes Hosea laugh, and some time in the summer of 1886 Hosea stops sleeping in the grand oak bedroom and moves down the hall with Bessie. 

It’s an unusually warm evening towards the end of autumn when Bessie turns to Hosea at the dinner table and says, “We ought to be married,” and Hosea cracks a grin wider than Arthur’s ever seen and says, “My dear, I thought you’d never ask.” 

The wedding takes place at City Hall, with Arthur standing by as witness. _Arthur Ashville,_ he signs the contract. The party is later, at the house on Cherry Street; everyone eats and drinks till they’re full and laughing, and near midnight Dutch, red in the face and talking so loud his voice cracks, staggers up onto a chair in the middle of the great old dining room and says, “To Hosea, the finest man I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing,” and everyone drinks but Hosea, who’s watching Dutch with an expression Arthur can’t read. But then Dutch throws back his head and laughs, and catches Arthur by the hand and swings him into a polka, and the party goes on and on as the phonograph spins its loud, gritty melodies. It lasts till the sun is leaching over the rooftops and the pigeons are making an almighty racket in the street. 

Arthur’s on the second floor balcony just before dawn, rolling a cigarette badly and whistling “Clementine,” when Bessie finds him. 

“Mornin’,” she says, leaning against the railing. Her hair’s come out of the plait it was in for the ceremony; she’s pink-cheeked from dancing. Arthur realizes he never thought she was pretty before. 

“I s’pose it is,” he says, squinting at the sky. It’s not light yet, but he can see the promise of daybreak in the faint strip of blue along the skyline. Blocks away, in the heart of the city, the milk trucks are starting to rattle over cobbled streets. 

Arthur lights his cigarette, and leans back against the cool brick. Downstairs, the phonograph is playing “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” Arthur watches Bessie swaying to the muffled tune, twisting the little gold ring as she hums, and the question’s out of his mouth before he thinks it. 

“Does he really love you?” 

As soon as he’s said it, he knows he’s done wrong. He’s too drunk; should have gone to bed hours ago, should never have come out here where she might follow and give him an opportunity to say out loud the thing he’s been wondering ever since she asked Hosea and he said yes. Should have kept his damn mouth shut, at the very fuckin’ least. 

“ _Jesus_ ,” he says, stumbling to his feet. “That was—shit, forget that, I’m drunk, I didn’t say anything.” He considers throwing himself off the balcony, but decides the fall would be too short to do anything but prolong the discomfort of this moment. 

Bessie’s grinning. “Sit down,” she says. “He does.” 

Arthur sits. “M’sorry,” he says. Bessie snorts. 

“You an’ him are close,” she says. It’s not a question. 

Arthur nods. “Yes, ma’am.” He remembers Hosea, maybe three months after they picked him up all them years ago, sitting beside him in the small hours of the morning while Arthur’s heart pounded a hundred beats to the minute, squinting out into the rain and saying you know, nobody’s goin’ to hurt you here. Nobody ever said that to Arthur before Hosea, and he said it like it was the most normal thing in the world, like he was telling Arthur the weather. Arthur’s never known how he seemed to know right away about Pa. 

Bessie nods. She’s lounging against the railing now with her arms crossed behind her, her back to the roofs of Chicago. “Hosea,” she says, “is too smart a man to get himself conned into marryin’, but don’t tell him I said it.” She rolls her eyes. “He’d be hell to live with.” 

“I won’t,” Arthur promises. 

“Good.” 

The phonograph downstairs cuts out for a moment, and Arthur can hear Dutch roaring about civilization. “It’s not you,” he says, even though he knows he should leave it. He wants to explain. He isn’t sure how. Isn’t sure _what_ it is he’s trying to explain. “I just—I guess I never thought him an’ Dutch—” 

“Oh,” Bessie says, “I know.” She’s got a look in her eye. Arthur doesn’t know what it is. 

“I’m drunk,” he announces. “I oughta—oughta just go.” He rolls up onto his feet, testing his balance, waiting a moment for the balcony to settle around him. He stubs his cigarette out on the brick, and gives Bessie an awkward nod. She holds out a hand to him, one elbow still propped against the rail, and squeezes his hand gently, once. 

“Never thought I’d have a step-son,” she says, in that odd low voice. She’s smiling. “Get some sleep, love.” 

Arthur nods, and ducks his head again. “Welcome to the family.” 

He slips back into the darkened upstairs hallway and makes his way down towards the bedroom where John’s been sleeping since Arthur carried him up here a few hours ago. Near the head of the staircase he pauses, drifting in the glow of light and song from downstairs. Dutch is talking, making some speech about the price of freedom and the things we lose to government when we put our trust in it to set us free. Hosea’s singing. Arthur watches the chandelier sway above the staircase, shards of crystal catching the firelight from below, and heads down the hall to bed as the sun breaks pink over a pale blue sky. 

  
  


5\. _Eastern Oregon, 1888_

Rain rolls through the pass for four days, trapping Dutch and his little family under the cover of canvas till nature relents. For four days, they eat cold salt pork and biscuits and play round after round of dominoes while the wind roars around their little capsules of stale air and piss and sweat. Arthur goes out fishing every day, evidently seized by a desire for the company of aquatic life, and some days John tags along, coming back knee-high in thick river mud. Neither of them’s much of a fisherman, but the little bass they bring back from the cloudy stream are a welcome addition to the cold fare Grimshaw’s serving up, and Dutch appreciates the sight of them together, bathed in the waters of Iskuulpa Creek, nearly the same height these days. 

The wilderness, Evelyn Miller says, reminds us of who we are, and when that fails us, it teaches us who to become. 

Dutch spends most of the rainstorm with Annabelle, fucking under the fur blanket he brought from Chicago and reading her Orestes Brownson in the dim light while she runs her fingers through his hair. In these moments, he feels the words running through his body like a current, pure truth conducted by her slender, teasing fingers, his whole self a lightning rod for knowledge and for love. More than once, he breaks off reading to make love to her, their breaths matched against the never-ending rhythm of the rain. 

He’s reading to her one afternoon, the third day of the deluge, when Arthur appears at the mouth of their tent. Since the night he rode in drunk, he and Dutch haven’t spoken much. Arthur fishes and Dutch reads and they trade nods over the water barrel or across the damp fire Grimshaw builds to fry the grimy fish the boys caught, but that’s the limit. Dutch has the sense that Arthur’s been avoiding him, but he’s also avoiding the bottle, and Dutch has little interest in disrupting whatever equilibrium he’s reached in private. Maybe, these thousands of miles from Mary Gillis, he’s finally moving on. 

Right now, he looks damp and peevish. The bruises have faded, leaching old blood into two black pouches under his eyes; his forehead’s creased with sweat.  
  


“You two busy?” he asks. Dutch looks at Annabelle. She’s combing her hair, but she shrugs. 

“What did you want?” he asks. Arthur shifts his weight onto his right leg; Dutch knows, even though Arthur won’t admit it, that the left always hurts when it rains. 

“Thought we oughta talk about that job,” he says, not looking directly at Dutch. He’s scanning the low table, the books and Dutch’s notes on the land they’re sojourning on, with his hands resting stubbornly on his belt. “That mail coach.”

“I suppose we should,” Dutch says, and nods to Annabelle, who twists her hair into a loose knot at the back of her head, collects a book and her comb, and slips out the tent past Arthur. 

They work out the details together, bent over the spread map Dutch picked up miles south when they first came up out of the Grizzlies. The first step is scoping out Raymond’s, getting a feel for Miss Raymond herself and for the terrain they’ll be working with when Wick and his two compatriots roll up. Arthur, pinching the bridge of his nose like he’s fighting back a headache, suggests that they oughta see where the jailhouse is, make sure the sheriff ain’t gonna come stickin’ his nose into any business that ain’t his. 

“What’s the haul,” he asks abruptly. As if his whole focus, till now, was doing the thing right; the execution and not the profits. “I mean, it ain’t just mail he’ll be carryin’, right?” 

“Course not,” Dutch says. “He’ll be ridin’ up from Indian Country to the agency at Umatilla, and he’ll have the mail for the Pacific Union Railroad office. Fair chance there’ll be government bonds in that coach.” 

Arthur nods, frowning. Dutch can see from his face that he doesn’t have a damn clue what a bond is, but he’s done with questions. In fact, he looks about ready to fall down, the way his face is pinched and the sweat’s gathering on his temples. Three days without a drink, and he’s sick. Dutch feels pity warring in his gut with disgust. 

“Get some rest,” he tells Arthur. “We ain’t goin’ anywhere till this rain clears up.” Arthur nods, rolls to his feet, and steadies himself briefly against the edge of the table. 

“Yessir,” he mumbles, and then he’s gone. 

On the fourth day, the rain begins to hesitate, spitting hard in the morning and then easing off around noon, so that Grimshaw builds a proper fire and roasts the boys’ morning catch while Tilly bakes biscuits over the griddle. For a wonderful hour, they sit together on upturned boxes in a sea of mud filling their stomachs with good, hot food, all of them except for Arthur, who still looks like hell and says he ain’t all that hungry. Then, as they’re soaking up the last of the briny fat with wads of biscuit, the sun slides under a wave of cloud, and the rain starts spattering against their bowls with sharp metallic _tings_. Everyone jumps into action to clear dinner away, and before evening the campfire’s a soup of dead coal, the rain pummelling the tents again through the long, cold night. 

The next morning dawns clear and dry, and Dutch and Arthur saddle up for Gopher Flats. Arthur’s looking better this morning, no sheen of sweat over his furrowed brow, but he’s quiet as they ride down out of the pass and up the mountain road toward Julia Raymond’s. Twitchy, like he’s got fleas under his collar. Dutch fills the silence as they pass through the dry hills and steep wheat plains of Umatilla County, listening to his own voice vanishing into the great abyss of nature. 

Gopher Flats is a tiny fleck on the landscape, barely more than an intersection. Pressed low against the face of the valley, it lives up to its name, with squat brown roofs clustered around a central dirt road. They pick out Miss Raymond’s place easy enough, the only building in town with enough space to sleep a dozen men and a gasping pair of rose bushes in the front yard that Dutch supposes are meant to indicate congeniality. He sends Arthur off to scope out the back of the house and the routes in and out of town, and steps inside to meet the lady of the house. 

To his surprise, the foyer is bright and tasteful, draped in golden velvet with warm sunlight falling through pristine windows onto the rich grain of walnut floorboards. Julia Raymond, a tall lady with a soft eye and a firm voice, greets him, and leads him into a similarly well-appointed dining room, where an Italian in a white vest is polishing glasses at the bar. Dutch, pleased with what he’s seeing, leans across the fine oak counter, lights a cigar, and sets his mind to learning what Julia Raymond’s made of. 

She’s made, he learns, of solid business sense and a sincere desire to bring a bit of culture to this impossibly starved patch of virgin land. Opera, it seems, is her passion, and Dutch has the pleasure of discussing Delibes and Bizet for several minutes before he recalls that he’s here, technically, on official criminal business. 

“I declare,” he says, rolling the whiskey around in his glass, “and I’m sure you’ll forgive me sayin’ it, Miss Raymond, but this don’t impress me as a place given to much in the way of cultural advancement. I do confess I’ve met more men in these parts lookin’ to gamble their wages away over a hand of poker than them seekin’ refinement and the higher pleasures of fine music.” 

Julia doesn’t blink. “Well, Mr. MacIntosh,” she says, “you’ll find none of that here. I run a decent house, and this town’s respectable.” 

So she can tell a lie. 

Dutch leads them down a few more avenues of conversation, nudging at the question of law enforcement and their likelihood of showing up unannounced on an average decent night in a respectable town. Julia mentions the sheriff’s office down the road, but from the sound of it the sheriff might be the town’s least respectable citizen. Dutch has a nose for bad blood, and he smells it in the way she talks about Sheriff Connelly. Satisfied with that information, he turns the talk back towards _Jean de Nivelle_ , and forgets for the moment that he’s anything but a traveler passing through this strange little oasis. 

The sun’s directly overhead when he finishes his cigar and bids Miss Raymond adieu, thanking her for her hospitality and for the rare pleasure of a morning of musical appreciation. He steps out into the dusty street, scanning the landscape for Arthur. There’s no sign of him; he’s probably up the road, Dutch reasons, tracing the path Wick’s wagon will be taking in four days’ time. 

Patience, even Dutch can admit, is not among his greatest virtues. He prefers to act, not wait, and standing in the pitiless Oregon sun quickly becomes intolerably boring. He heads down the town’s single street, studying the gray profile of the hills rising up on every side, and locates the saloon. It’s everything that Raymond’s boarding house isn’t—cramped, ugly, and vulgar, with a choke of smog from the accumulated exhalations of a coal stove, five kerosene lamps, and the cigarettes of twenty men. Dutch squints through the smoke, makes his way to the bar, and orders a beer. 

He’s near the end of the bottle, and reaching the point of real aggravation with Arthur, who should have been able to scout the road in half the time it’s taken, when he hears the commotion at the back of the building, and knows at once that it’s Arthur. It’s always goddamn Arthur. 

Arthur’s in the hallway behind the bar, a dank recess of smoke and shadow, and he’s fighting with a man fairly twice his age, with a sour eye and shoulders that practically fill the space. Dutch watches as he punches Arthur, twice, his fist driving capably into Arthur’s ribs. There’s another fellow lounging behind them, leaner but just as tall, watching approvingly as his friend proceeds to crack Arthur’s skull against the rough-split panels of the wall. 

“Teach you to try stealin’ from me again,” the friend’s saying. Dutch watches Arthur reel forward, one hand cupped at his welling nose like he’s trying to catch the blood, his right side stupidly open. Sure enough, his mark slams a heavy fist into his right ear, knocking Arthur off balance so that he spins halfway around, falling back against the wall. The man in the corner laughs. 

Dutch has seen Arthur fight three men at once and come up grinning. This ain’t Arthur fighting: this is Arthur stupid, drunk and dulled and determined to introduce an element of goddamn fucking idiocy into the one scheme Dutch has been able to conjure to get them out of this fucking country and living as they’re meant to. Dutch watches him lurch back to his feet and swing hard at the big fellow, who steps neatly out of the way and rewards Arthur with an uppercut to the jaw. 

Arthur drops. The big man, satisfied that he’s down to stay, turns to his friend, and together they head out the back. Dutch watches Arthur roll onto his hands and knees, spitting blood onto the rancid carpet before tipping backwards to sit against the wall. He’s breathing hard, harder than he ought to be from a fight that lasted all of four minutes. Dutch can see his hands shaking. 

Dutch thinks about Hosea, outside the wood shed that bitter morning in the Grizzlies. The brilliant icicles; the mud under their feet. Hosea smiled the whole goddamn time. All them years, and Hosea walked away.

He turns and walks back through the grimy hubbub of the barroom, out into sunlight. He whistles for the Count and mounts up, his eyes on the hills, his mind turning over and over the thought of those deep roots of stone, laid centuries ago by flood and turmoil, driving up through the weight of the very earth to surround the little town of Gopher Flats. As he rides back down toward the mountain pass, he’s dreaming of primordial chaos and of open country up north, beyond the cold, flat waters of the Columbia. 

  
  


6\. _Chicago, 1887_

In April, they become criminals. 

Arthur’s broken the law before—that ain’t new. With Pa, stealing was like drinking; he always did prefer it to working. Then Pa died, and Arthur lit out on his own, twelve and too big and just smart enough to know he was too stupid to do anything but fight his way. So he fought and stole and sneaked onto stock cars past midnight, and ten years ago when Dutch caught him trying to lift milk off a wagon in Shelbyville he learned how to shoot a gun and how to work a con so the fellow you’re fleecing never finds out you’re telling him a lie. Dutch and Hosea never had any more respect for the law than Pa did, and Dutch doesn’t make it a secret. 

But robbing a bank—well, that’s new, and when Dutch strides into the kitchen one afternoon and announces to Arthur that he’s gonna be helping him and Hosea hit Lee and Hoyt’s banking house out in Belvidere, Arthur knows something’s changing. 

It’s a plan, Arthur realizes, that Dutch and Hosea have been working on pretty much since they got to Chicago—all them garden parties for the church and visits to old friends who just happened to know a bit about safe cracking; the trips out west of the city and Dutch’s friend at the tobacconist’s across the street from the bank; even the little job at that foul druggist’s in the fall now looks like a trial run. 

In the end, robbing a bank’s not a lot harder than stealing from a shopkeeper with sharp eyes—it just requires a little extra planning, and a couple more guns. They walk out with $5,000 in gold, into the shantytowns and farmland, and Arthur enjoys the unique pleasure of watching Dutch, in a tailcoat and checked bandanna with rings bristling from his fingers, presenting a sack of gold to a lady with no teeth and six kids caterwauling in her muddy yard. Once they’ve made the rounds of the slums and the orphanage, there’s enough left over for a damn good party and a new set of drawing pencils for Arthur. 

The pencils and the increase in the quality of Grimshaw’s board make up, in their way, for the fact that through the spring and into the summer, Chicago’s dotted with posters seeking the three armed felons who broke into Lee and Hoyt’s. They don’t have any names, and the clerks could only give a rough description, but it’s enough to put Arthur, who’s never been a wanted man before, on edge. It also ups the risk factor for cons and robberies, and Grimshaw starts bringing in girls to work nights and afternoons to make up the difference. 

The sensible thing to do, Dutch keeps saying, would be to pick up and move west—out into open country where the Chicago Metropolitan Police ain’t got jurisdiction. But Hosea argues that it’s not worth giving up the house, not with a kid and the ladies with them, not unless it becomes absolutely necessary. Bessie’s taken a job at the free clinic, and Hosea’s been running odd jobs for local shopkeepers, ferrying salt pork and handkerchiefs from the stockyards. Retirement, that’s what Hosea’s talking about, though he always adds “for the time being” when he sees the look in Dutch’s eye. 

Arthur, for his part, spends the bulk of his time looking after John, who’s learning to read more or less against his will under Dutch’s dogged direction and who gets into more trouble on his own than the rest of them combined. Arthur has to fish him out of a neighbor’s chimney one day, and the next week he’s down at the train station bribing a porter to let him check the luggage John’s stowed himself away in. The kid runs constantly, like there’s something in him that wants him on the move, that won’t let him stay. 

“I like y’all fine,” he tells Arthur on the streetcar back from the depot, when Arthur asks why the hell he keeps running off. Doesn’t he like staying at the house; what’s he scared of. “Ain’t scared.” He’s squinting out the window, dark eyes set in a stubborn gaze. He won’t look at Arthur. 

Arthur supposes he knows what it feels like, to want to run. If he’s honest, a part of him wishes Hosea would listen to Dutch and take them out of here, out of the crowd and stink of the city, where there’s hardly room to ride and the sky’s more smog than blue, where Arthur hasn’t been alone in going on three years. That part’s loud these days, the part that misses California and the smell of Ponderosa pine, the part that’s never felt at home in a city with streetcars and factories and buildings tall enough to cast a shadow across an afternoon. But the other part of him is in love with Mary Gillis. 

He bought a ring with his share of the takings from Lee and Hoyt. It’s a beautiful thing, bright gold with a little red stone in the middle, but every time he thinks about giving it to her something stops him. Maybe it’s the thought of Mr. Gillis scowling at him over dinner, asking where on earth he came up with the money for a thing like that. Maybe it’s just the fear, lodged deep in his gut, that she’ll say no, and the knowledge that she’d have every reason to say it. So he keeps the ring in his pocket, feels his heart rising in his throat every time he sees her, and never takes it out through the whole hot summer, while they walk through the park and eat sandwiches in the little ice cream parlor down the block from All Saints’ and kiss in her white-curtained bedroom while Mr. Gillis is at the races. 

It’s not until October, when the wanted posters with his description start fading off the walls and post office boards of the city, that he stops one cool night outside the gate to her father’s house and puts his hand in his pocket for the little box he’s been carrying since May. They’ve just come from the theater, and Mary’s cheeks are pink in the autumn chill. She turns at the gate, looking to see what’s slowed him, and when he sinks onto one knee, the look in her eyes is joy and disbelief mixed with an edge of worry. 

“Oh, Arthur,” she says, and Arthur can see she’s fighting the instinct to turn and look at the house. He can feel sodden leaves under his knee, soaking into the fabric of his pants. 

“I know I ain’t,” he starts, but Mary doesn’t let him finish. She’s kissing him before he knows it, murmuring her breathless _yes_ into his mouth as she clutches at his hair and Arthur tries his best not to drop the damn ring. 

“Daddy won’t like it,” is the first thing she says when they break apart. 

“I know,” Arthur admits. The weight that flew out of his stomach a few moments ago settles back in. But then Mary laughs, and says, “Oh, who _cares_ , Arthur,” and they’re kissing again. Arthur wonders what kind of luck the almighty’s given him, and who it was meant for. 

Hosea beams when he hears the news, and Grimshaw shakes her head and says “she’ll think better of it,” and Dutch claps Arthur on the back and says well done, damn you. John’s considerably more interested in getting double his share of dinner than in the information that Arthur’s going to be married, but he nods and says “Okay,” which Arthur considers ample congratulations. 

It’s only a few weeks later, when he and Mary are out to dinner on a rainy night, that everything falls apart. 

They’re in the dining room at Fairfield’s, with its neat white tablecloths and long oak bar, and Arthur’s in the suit Dutch bought him for the church social and still not tired of watching the ruby on Mary’s finger catch the light from the gas lamps hung from the ceiling, when he overhears someone a few tables away talking about the bank robbery. At first, he thinks he’s imagining things—they’re not the only people to rob a bank in Chicago this year, after all. But then the man’s voice cuts through the chatter again, saying “...my fine patriotic friends and I, we’re goin’ to relieve you of that gold,” and Arthur’s only heard that speech once, from one man. He turns, craning his neck around a potted fern, and makes out the distinct profile of one of the clerks from Lee and Hoyt’s, a little hairy man with a snub nose and a mole on his neck, bending over the tablecloth to regale his female companion with the story of the great bank robbery. 

Arthur chokes on his soup, and alarms Mary coughing till he’s finally cleared oyster stew from his windpipe. For the rest of the meal, he’s too tense to eat much, nodding absently to Mary’s account of a dispute among the ladies’ garden association and angling his body just slightly left in hopes of catching another scrap of the bank clerk’s conversation. Just after the waiter brings their dinner—a delicious-smelling roast that Arthur no longer has any appetite for—the clerk and his lady friend get up from their table, and turn in Arthur’s direction. 

His heart nearly stops, but he reasons that there’s no chance this fellow, who saw him six months ago and with a kerchief over his face, ought to pick him out of the crowd eating at Fairfield’s tonight. He wills himself to stay in his seat, tries to listen to Mary, and watches as the clerk approaches their table, glances at Arthur, and stops in his tracks. They’re facing each other, barely three feet apart, and Arthur watches in oddly precise slow motion as the man from the bank recognizes him. 

Arthur, with half a bottle of wine inside him and no time to come up with a strategy, stands up and punches him in the face. 

The things that happen afterward happen very fast, and very deliberately. The clerk gasps, ducking away as blood starts pouring from his nose, and Arthur hits him again, aiming this time for his jaw. He gets two more good blows in before someone’s grabbing him by the shoulder, and someone else has hold of his other arm, and Arthur, whose chest hurts from the rhythm of his heart throughout dinner, does what he learned to do when he was twelve and slams his head backwards. Bone on bone, his skull cracks the nose of the bartender trying to subdue him, and he wheels back towards the clerk, who’s got one hand up in supplication and the other clutching his bloody face. 

“Please,” he chokes, “please, I didn’t mean any harm, I don’t know who you are. Please.” 

Arthur can hear his own blood in his ears. He feels as if he’s floating near the coffered ceiling, watching himself loom over this pathetic man. “Say it again,” he spits. 

“Please,” the clerk says. There’s a gurgle in his throat; he coughs, and blood showers the carpet. “I don’t know you.” 

A stronger pair of hands than before grab Arthur by his collar, and this time he can’t wrench himself free immediately. “Mister,” the hands say, “you’re gonna have to leave.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, Arthur can see Mary sitting at their table. She’s got a hand over her mouth, but there’s no mistaking the look in her eyes, that sick terror mixed with pure confusion. Like she’s watching a stranger, watching an animal in the place of someone she thought she knew. Arthur knows what he’s seeing. She looks like Mama used to when Pa’s temper lit up.

The hands on his neck tighten. Arthur’s gut lurches. “Get the hell out,” the voice says, “before I call the law.”

They leave together, walking ten feet apart, Mary with her coat and muff clutched up to her and her eyes fixed on the ground under her feet. Outside, the cold hits Arthur’s face so sharply it nearly hurts, and it brings him back to earth, where he’s standing on a sidewalk with Mary staring at him in such open horror Arthur doesn’t know what to say. 

“I’m sorry,” he starts, but Mary shakes her head before he can go any farther. 

“No,” she says. Arthur’s heart, temporarily lulled by the clerk’s profession of ignorance, starts hammering against his chest wall again. 

“Mary—”

“Who was that?” 

“That weren’t nobody,” Arthur says, knowing how stupid he sounds, but too rattled and drunk to do anything about it. “That—I made a mistake. I can explain.”

“Can you?” she says. Before Arthur has a chance to try, she’s stepping into a cab, and then he’s alone outside the restaurant, with blood on his knuckles and his legs shaking so hard it’s a minute before he can start walking. 

When he gets back to the house, he tries to make it to the back kitchen to wash up before anyone sees him, but Hosea catches him, and because he’s Hosea, he knows immediately that something’s wrong. Arthur, who wants to talk about it possibly less than any of the multitude of things Hosea has ever convinced him to talk about, tries to duck into the kitchen, but Hosea follows, and then they’re in there together, pinned in the dark wooden box of the kitchen with the smell of the bank clerk’s blood on Arthur’s hands and his suit pants, and Arthur finds that he can’t breathe. His hands are still shaking, nearly an hour afterward. Hosea won’t leave him alone. 

“Ran into one of them fellers from the bank,” Arthur says, finally, when he’s scrubbed the worst of the blood off his hands and clothes and gotten a bit of oxygen back in his lungs. “Had a little trouble. But it’s done now. He won’t talk.” 

Hosea’s expression is gratifyingly even. “When you say ‘done,’” he says lightly, “are we discussing the sort of thing that might necessitate leaving town?” 

“I didn’t kill him,” Arthur says. There’s a little pool of watery blood on the floor; he scuffs it away with the toe of his boot. “It’s over.”

Hosea nods. Arthur can still feel his eyes on him. Mary’s voice is in his head. He thinks, for a moment, that he might throw up. 

He takes a cigarette out of his pocket, and fumbles with his matches till Hosea reaches over and lights one for him. 

“Thanks,” Arthur mumbles. 

“Of course,” Hosea says. Arthur inhales, a jagged breath, and holds it for a moment before letting the smoke stream out. 

“Don’t say anything to Dutch.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Hosea says. 

Arthur rolls his shoulders, trying to twitch off the phantom feeling of hands at his throat, trying to will his heart to slow down. He wants a goddamn drink. Hosea, leaning easily against the worn butcher’s block, lights a cigarette of his own and watches the smoke drift toward the darkened ceiling. 

“You’re not like him,” he says. He doesn’t say who. Arthur closes his eyes. 

He can’t tell Hosea what happened. Can’t admit that he ruined his chance at the one good thing he’s ever set his mind to having. Can’t say that even now, he wishes he’d hit the guy till he stopped moving, till he could be sure he’d never put them in any danger. It’s an ache in his chest, a sick fever in the core of him, itching to strike out and do as much damage as he’s got in him. 

Hosea’s wrong. He’s exactly like his father. 

They stay in the kitchen a while longer, smoking in silence while Arthur slowly strips off the jacket and pants from his ruined suit. Miss Grimshaw’ll know how to clean that mess, Hosea says, so Arthur leaves the bloody things in the wash basin and finishes his cigarette, shivering in his shirtsleeves and drawers while Hosea talks about the latest Aldous Filson book. 

That’s his life now, Arthur realizes. He’s nothing but a story in one of them dime novels, a lowlife criminal on the run from the law. He ain’t the leading man, and what a goddamn idiot he was to ever imagine it. The realization lodges like a rock in his throat, and he swallows around it till he’s brought it down to his stomach, a sick and heavy weight under the blunt rhythm of his heart. 

  
  


7\. _Eastern Oregon, 1888_

On the 7th of June, Horace Wick leaves La Grande, in company with a shotgun messenger and a mountain guard, riding north towards Umatilla. The morning takes them through Bear Canyon and along the steep twists of the Grande Ronde, till they split off northward towards California Gulch. They stop for lunch at a little farm on Meacham Creek, where a woman with round cheeks and a pink birthmark on her right hand feeds them cold chicken and cornbread, washed down with hot coffee. Apart from that bright spot of hospitality, though, the road to Umatilla’s strikingly lonely: nothing but miles on end of empty mountain roads under a calm sky. Around the middle of the afternoon, the fellow riding shotgun falls asleep. 

Evening takes them up into the high plains of Umatilla County, where settlers are planting clapboard farms on either side of the winding mail road. Every time Horace drives through, it seems there’s another store-bought barn standing up from the land. 

They stop for the night at Julia Raymond’s. After a day in the dust and hollow silence of the Blue Mountains, the house is resplendent, a dream in Baroque velvet and hot pot roast, with orchestral backing. Horace and his companions eat a good dinner at Miss Raymond’s table, and when the guards head towards the bar to follow up their meal with a sampling of the house’s best liquor, Horace Wick slips down the side hallway to the curtained room at the back of the house where the men from the Bishop sheep ranch are waiting. 

Dutch, listening to _Le roi malgré lui_ pour out of Julia Raymond’s phonograph, watches him go. He checks the time against his pocket watch; it’s twelve minutes to 10. John ought to be working on the lockbox by now. 

When Dutch told him he’d be helping out on the mail job, John gaped like a day-old fish, but Dutch could see the glint of satisfaction in his eye. It’s been a while since he begged for permission to ride along—fifteen and he’s aged out of that particular childish antic—but Dutch knows he’s been waiting for this, for a chance to prove he’s better than what he came from. That he’s all that Dutch believes he can be. On the way up from the camp in the mountains, the borrowed Schofield strapped to his skinny hip, John held himself like a general, his dark eyes fixed clear and steady on the trail ahead. 

The plan is simple: John waits behind the wagons till cover of darkness, and Dutch stations himself in Raymond’s dining room to watch the mail carrier and his guards, ensuring that the coast is clear for John to set to work. The boy’s not as seasoned as Arthur when it comes to locks, and his hands don’t have the raw strength Arthur’s do, but Arthur spent the morning heaving up the dregs of what he drank the night before, and Arthur’s lost the capacity to avoid trouble. John is sober and bright and devoted, and Dutch trusts that he’ll get the job done. 

One of the guards at the bar stretches, says something to his neighbor, and heads toward the back door. Dutch lifts his cigar, angling the lit butt towards the windowpane beside him, and flicks it gently, twice, a signal to John in the back yard that someone’s coming. He prays the boy’s watching. 

John apparently is, because the guard’s gone for half an hour with no calamity, and when he reappears in the doorway to the dining room there’s nothing on his face to suggest that he just apprehended a long-haired teenager robbing the coach that the California and Oregon Stage Company hired him to protect. He trades places with his comrade, who lounges reluctantly towards the door, and Dutch raises his cigar once again: _flick_ , _flick_. The changing of the guards. 

It ain’t as fun as with Hosea. Dutch has to admit that to himself, just then. With Hosea, there was always a dose of theater, a heavy dash of the unexpected; with Hosea, they looked a man in the eye when they robbed him, without this skulking around in the dark. There was a poetry about it that Dutch always thought he had before Hosea, but now, watching the California and Oregon man’s back as he downs his second pitcher of beer, he feels the unfamiliar and unwelcome sensation of doubt. 

What’s this country done to him, he wonders. What’s it done to them all. 

It’s fifteen minutes later, just before the guards switch places again, that he sees the brief spark from the darkness outside, and knows that John’s finished the job. He takes his time making his departure, thanking Miss Raymond for the unparalleled pleasure of her hospitality, and ducks out into the darkness, hurrying down the lamplit vein of Main Street to where the horses are waiting, tethered at the edge of town. 

John’s waiting for him, arms crossed over the heavy mail pouch, the obvious glow of triumph struggling on his face against the desire to look serious and grown. Dutch can’t help the grin that breaks over him at the sight. John, seeing it, drops the fight and beams. 

“We done it,” he says, a hoarse half-whisper; he knows better than to be heard. John knows better about a great many things than Hosea ever gave him credit for. Doubt’s out of Dutch’s mind, replaced with an unshakable faith that destiny ain’t done blessing him. 

“We surely did,” Dutch says, and together they ride out of Gopher Flats, back to camp and freedom. 

That night, there’s feasting and jubilation in the heights of the Blue Mountains. Grimshaw’s kept the fire up from supper, and when Dutch and John ride back into camp she pulls out a case of beer and a bottle of red wine, and they toast to the future. Dutch empties the pouch onto the open canvas of his cot, and finds it’s enough to take them over state lines and farther still, enough, maybe, to buy a patch of land out of reach of the government’s arm in a place where nature still governs, untrammeled by men and the weighty chains of finance. He kisses Annabelle over the heap of bills, and laughs till his belly’s sore. 

Arthur’s sulking, of course, sticking to the shadows of his tent while the rest of the camp sings and celebrates. Dutch has no doubt in his mind that he’s feeling sorry for himself, but he can’t discover any particular pity in his heart for the fool. One day, Dutch thinks, he’ll remember what loyalty means. Or he won’t, and he’ll break Dutch’s heart all over again. Dutch hopes it’ll be the first, but he’s prepared his wrath for the latter. 

Annabelle’s mouth is on him. Hosea is in the Grizzlies, no doubt asleep in this exquisite summer’s dawn, in bed with a wife he can’t love, living a life he’s chosen over Dutch. It ain’t fair, and it ain’t right, and Dutch will never understand how or why it came to be, just as sure as he’ll never stop loving Hosea. Annabelle’s heartbeat is under his fingers, and his own heart beats in time, urging him towards some beautiful, impossible conclusion. 

Wilderness, unlike man, is incapable of falsehood. The wilderness is taking him up now, out of the dust, into the promised land. 

**Author's Note:**

> Half of this fic is set in Oregon, but in a somewhat loose approximation of Oregon; I’ve nabbed place names and mapped the geography of the story onto the northeastern portion of the state, but the places and events don’t really match up very well to history. For instance, Meacham, where Arthur gets arrested at the beginning of the story, wasn’t called Meacham until two years later in 1890. Gopher Flats is a census-designated place that doesn’t seem to have existed in any sense until about 2000. Most importantly, the area in which most of this action takes place is roughly the area of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, established in 1855 for the Umatilla, the Walla Walla, and the Cayuse—something that doesn’t come up here at all. So in plotting this story onto Oregon, I’m shifting the map and the timeline considerably. 
> 
> The “First Bank Robbery Scrap” in the game lists the name, but not the location, of the first bank the gang robbed, so I’m taking a lot of liberties there—with the location, the circumstances, and the likelihood that the Chicago Metropolitan Police would go months without apprehending Dutch & Co. while they continued their business pretty openly. It’s probably not what would have happened or how the creators intended that chapter of the story to go, but it’s how I’m doing things. 
> 
> The operas and composers Dutch references in parts 5 and 7 are based off the music that plays from his tent in camp, and on my best approximation of what was Hot and Popular in the opera world in 1888. I don't know or care for opera. 
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at [onlytherocksliveforever](https://onlytherocksliveforever.tumblr.com/).


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